Wild Magic Four: The Light Beyond Constellations- a M/M fantasy romance

Prologue: The Storm

GRIFFIN—

I wanted to scream, to claw my way out of my own skin, leave it in a puddle of gore behind me and never look back. Never remember this moment, this gods-forsaken moment of utter horror.

Ravin help me, I prayed, feeling bile creep up my throat at the sight before me. The carnage I had wrought.

The child was... four, five maybe? The mother— older sister, aunt?— only in her teens. Both lay entwined in each other's arms, their faces blurred by the wetness that threatened to completely blind me, the destruction of the hut around them nearly obstructing them from view anyway. I dared not look too closely. I couldn't bear the thought of seeing just how much pain they'd endured in their death.

You bring destruction wherever you step, you freak! I heard the long-ago voice ringing in my ears as if brought to me on the wind from outside the small hut.

Maybe she'd been right. Maybe that gods-awful woman had been correct in her hatred of me. Maybe she'd been correct to condemn me and try to end my life before I could do this. Before I could cause the end of these lives. The lives of so many innocents.

"Halt! Put your weapons down, and we'll spare your lives!"

I flinched, stepping back from the bodies, and turned to the doorway of the hut. A contingent of Swabiri soldiers rode in on their stunning desert stallions, their weapons drawn as they looked down at the carnage I and the others had wrought.

But mostly what I had wrought. Only I could bring entire buildings down with tooth and claw, with rage and tearing and power.

I dared to spare one last glance at the child and their mother, but when I looked back, the babe was sitting up, staring at me with dead, pale eyes.

"You'll suffer for this," the child intoned, the words less threat than prediction.

"I know," I whispered back.

I came to consciousness suddenly, my chest heaving with fear as I stared around me, trying to orient myself.

Gods, five years. Five years in a squalid Swabiri prison, another wandering the wilds of Nefiir, and the dreams— the nightmares— still came regularly. When they weren't of the child and their mother, they were of the torture inflicted on me in the prison. Of the whippings and drownings. The many, many blows. More than half of my nightmares featured that near-fatal blow, when I'd dared try to claw at the proti collar they kept around my neck to hold my bear at bay. The guard, the one I'd called Split Lip since I'd head butted him and drew his formidable wrath, had used the butt of his sword against my head. I'd fallen like a boulder and been unconscious for days.

I woke with an agonizing headache, the taste of dirt and bile and piss in my mouth, and the loss of both my sight and sense of smell. My sight came back with time. My nose never worked right again.

If there was some kind of award for bad choices, I should've won it a hundred times over. Soon after leaving that horrid woman who had pretended to raise me, I'd fallen in with a group of mercenaries who had dragged me along, decimating entire towns in their greed. I'd followed along, young and angry and full of pride in the great power my bear brought me. Arrogant that the witch had been wrong about me. I was powerful and invincible.

That last raid had taken the pride right out from under me and left me bereft of all but the rage and a numb, almost apathetic sort of self-hatred.

I stared up at the canopy of trees above me as my mind continued to try to orient itself, wondering how I had managed to find myself in this position. Taken down for something I hadn't even done. By a bobcat.